[1999-12-08-AJW] Manami Toyota vs Kyoko Inoue

[Loss]

Talk about it here.

[Loss]

I know I'll be in the minority on this, but I think this is my favorite Toyota-Kyoko match. Both are past their peaks, so they do more matwork and are forced to slow down and it makes a lot of stuff get over more than it normally would. It's still fast-paced, but not gratingly so. At the same time, it still feels like a Toyota-Inoue match, only it has the feel of a final encounter. (I understand they had one more fairly big match in 2000.)

 

Don't get me wrong - if you don't like this series, you won't like this match. But I think it's a fitting way to do the match years after the rivalry has peaked.

[ohtani's jacket]

This was a good match all things considered. Kyoko is probably my least favourite singles match-up for Toyota and was grossly overweight here, but as a greatest hits, end of the 90s match this was fun. Everything prior to the stretch run was inconsequential, but nothing was drawn out and the match was an extremely easy watch. Kyoko's weight added starch to some of her moves, but the loss of athleticism was sad to see when you consider the girl from '91-93.

[Tim Evans]

Best thing I can say about this is at least it wasn't 60 minutes. Not bad but a lot of "your move, my move" stuff that Joshi is known for. The worst part is Toyota doing a balcony dive and that isn't even the finish. And like OJ said, it was short and not very hard to watch but not my thing at all.

[Zenjo]

This was a really good card until the final two matches. On paper this was an appropriate way to end the 90's, but I didn't care for the match at all. The rivalry felt stale as did the wrestling. Before the bell they did some comedy regarding the handshake. That set the tone for a lighthearted build with crowd clapalong sessions. It developed into a low intensity, by the numbers spotfest. Bad Joshi. They tried to do an epic stretch but had given themselves no base. They weren't in the shape of years past either. The notion that kicking out of finishers is somehow 'taking it to the next level' is woefully misguided.

[tim]

I liked the very beginning and the run of big spots from Toyota featuring a dive onto a table and off the balcony, but outside of that this didn't impress me. Just lots of not particularly interesting move trading.

[PeteF3]

I had fun with this in spite of myself, though there were some glaring flaws. It functioned as a Greatest Hits match between the two and in that aspect it was fun--in front of one of the hotter AJW crowds in the latter half of the decade. Maybe not anything new under the sun, but as joshi in general and AJW in particular got more and more marginalized as the '90s wore on, it ended up being kinda fun to see the old spots again, some with new twists like Manami mocking Kyoko's clapping-hip-shimmy-Indian-deathlock taunt thing. I do think the closing stretch went on a little too long, but at this point it's sort of like complaining about WrestleMania being too long--not wrong, just pointless. That's what joshi is and that's what Manami is in particular. The finish itself falls flat too, and that's because of a spectacularly ill-conceived idea to apparently have Manami attempt to perform Kyoko's Victoria Driver/Burning Hammer on her--I don't know who came up with that, but I don't know how they could have expected that to come off. And indeed it doesn't, as Manami just drops Kyoko unconvincingly, pouts for a few seconds, then performs the JOCS to put her away.

 

As a microcosm of this feud and '90s joshi in general, this had all the good and all the warts you'd expect. For better or for worse it's an appropriate way for the decade to go out.

 

We've finished AJPW and now joshi (apparently) for the decade, and as I approach the end of this massive Yearbook project darned if I'm not getting a little nostalgic. About 5 years of Yearbook-viewing later, knowing almost nothing about the product other than who the big names were, I'm starting to fancy myself a bit of a joshi expert. Maybe I've just moved up the rankings of viewer knowledge just because the '90s scene has faded from Internet discussion.